Quarantine

Wow, what a read!  I finished this last night about  midnight and then just kept  mulling it over for ages. I could not leave this novel behind me and I think that is one of its strongest pulls, its pitch perfect sense of time and place.  This is no mean feat considering we are talking about Jesus in the wilderness about 2000 years ago.  Infact by coincidence the time of the Christian calendar we are in now, the lent period before Easter. 

But don't be fooled, this is no biblical allegory of what it was like to be in the wilderness for 40 days and night without water and food.  This was the harsh reality, with a thumping fist, of what life was like for the people of this time, as the caves around Jesus were also full of fasting misfits trying to find peace with themselves and their existence. (Running off to caves in the wastelands of the Jericho hinterland for spiritual guidance seemed to be a bit of a 'thing' during this period. )

Now Jim Crace is passionate about his scenario and every time I read bits of this book my heart raced because life comes across as so unremittingly awful and harsh. Jesus arrives from the  Galilee to test his strength in god.  ( Crace always used a small case for God, not capital which I found odd to begin with, but could understand by the end...nothing was formalised. ) 

Jesus is young and unaware of his talents and as he is  walking through the scrubland trying to find a cave to sleep in he finds a dying man and innocently heals him and brings him back from the brink of death. Infact the man he cures is totally horrendous, a devil in human form. His wife is really frustrated that he is still alive because it means more subjugation and ridicule. But Jesus is unaware of his actions because he hides himself away in a cave for an unprecedented 40 days without food or water to fight his own temptations and have his own personal discussion with god. Jesus is hard core....he doesn't do what the other spiritual people do.  They all break the fast  after sunset because this is sensible, but not Jesus, and everyone knows that after just 30 days of no water or food you will die, especially in that heat.

I don't really know how to put into words the affect this book had on me.  Crace is not a religious man at all, he is a story teller and he does a fantastic job at telling us what starvation and thirst does do the body but what I really liked about this book is that Jesus and his personal torments were not a a major part of the book.  People's lives were going on around him and ultimately when something 'biblical' happens, other mundane lives and relationships of equal worth are building/breaking.  But Crace's incredibly linguistic and poetic way of writing did turn this book into quite a weirdly spiritual experience for me. The human devil is clearly expressed via Musa, the awful guy whom Jesus innocently brings back from the dead, Jim Crace sure knows how to write enigmatically about evil!   But  I'm not sure what Jesus role is in this book.  We know he is meant to embody the opposite of evil, but does he? To me he embodies people's hope and wishes. other people have told you what he has done, so you want to believe it yourself.  this is so true when Musa tells his tale of rebirth to the other cave dwellers and then they all hang around outside Jesus' cave hoping that he will come out and cure them.  But he never does.  He is too immature at this time and self possessed with his own demons,  a kind of religious  fanatic. But the ending is strangely ambiguous. To Christians it will be  sacraligous, to me it made a kind of perfect sense BUT it is something Iwould really like to talk to with someone who has read the book!   Freia?!